Up and ready to go - well almost

Eureka! At last we have found workshops we can collaborate with. It's been remarkably hard finding people who can do the high quality we need, quickly and reliably and at the right price - and NOT in a sweatshop set-up. So, it's come down to two small workshops - one of which is basically a fine tailor, the other a place specialising in soft furnishings. In both cases the quality is beautiful and we feel confident that we'll get lovely results. But we must have tried out about twelve separate places - and that was only the ones we decided to try samples with - loads more didn't even get to that stage. The samples that aren't perfect we'll probably sell on "special". They are all fine to most eyes, but have either small snags (one person put the lining in the wrong way round, so that there is a small pleat at one side - wouldn't bother me, but perfect it isn't) or they are "one-offs" in the sense that the person sewing refused to do more (we found two people who did nice sewing, but it took them a long time so the pay for them worked out too low - it's why we went for professionals in the end, as they can run up a bag perfectly AND quickly). Oh - thank goodness we've solved it. Honestly, at one point we nearly gave up. So - shop is almost done (but is as we speak being linked into the Worldpay secure system - by a specialist UK company, that's way beyond my capabilities). I think we MAY (fingers crossed) be up and running this weekend. If you have any special requests for cushions or bags now might be the time to mention them, as we are about to design two batches. We can't take special orders (just too hard as both sewing places only want to do batches for now) but you CAN of course nudge us to do more cats, more fairytales or whatever. We'll be using a lot of vintage fabric - we've found some lovely pieces here recently. One issue by the way (sorry, this is probably boring), is that what a lot of people doing this style of digital printing DON'T tell you is that it fades a bit the first time it's dry-cleaned. Most colours simply fade a little, and it still looks fine (in fact not really noticeable if you aren't looking) but yellows and oranges - those sort of tones - fade badly. So for now, we will only do those on a few bags where we feel that it will be feasible to simply clean by going over them with a damp sponge (many of my bags have that cleaning instruction, and when I thought about it I realised I've probably in fact never cleaned a bag anyway). But for most of the bags we do - and for cushions - expect a restricted colour range until we have solved this. Lots of blues and purples and soft monochromes folks! The fairytale bag below will be fine - those colours stay true though the pink on the print will perhaps become softer. But we will only do full-colour cats combined with dark fabrics. It means we can't do really strong red and black vampusses - a bit of a disappointment although we can do more moody colours. Still, perhaps Vampuss bags were a bit of a niche thing anyway - though must say I would love one. Oh well, anyway, enough - the best thing will be to show what we have later this week. It is SO exciting after all this time!